1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to semiautomatic electrical wiring apparatus and methods and, more particularly, to rapid and accurate connections of twisted pairs to the backplane of an electrical cabinet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Typical prior art methods for providing internal wiring in electrical cabinets include the separate fabrication by hand of a wiring harness which can then be mounted in the frame and the individual wire ends identified and terminated at the proper termination points within the cabinet. Not only is it expensive to produce the basic wiring harnesses in this fashion, but the efforts of the operator to identify wire ends to make the proper connections is also substantial. Finally, such techniques often involve considerable operator errors due to the tedious and repetitious nature of the process. Flat cable harnesses reduce some of these problems but still require operator identification and handling of each of the wires in order to accomplish termination.
Another common method for terminating wires in an electrical cabinet is an automatic computer-driven wire wrapping machine which automatically wraps the ends of wires around connector pins and routes the wires between these terminations. Such machines are extremely expensive and handle only a single wire at a time. Hence these machines are not suitable for twisted telephone pairs in which two wires must be routed together with the twist intact and yet each individual wire properly terminated at the appropriate connection point.